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People are just as bad as my LLMs

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Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#91

Post by ziaowang »

Xelynega wrote: post #73
ziaowang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This understanding is incomplete in my opinion. LLMs are more than emulating observed behavior. In the pre-training phase tasks like masked language model indeed train the model to mimic what they read (which of course contains lots of bias); but in the RLHF phase, the model tries to generate the best response judged by human evaluations (who tries to eliminate as much bias as possible in the process). In other words…

I don't understand what you are saying. How can the RLHF phase eliminate bias if it uses a process(human input) that has the same biases as the pre-training(human input)?

Texts in the wild used during pre-training contain lots of biases, such as racial and sexual biases, which are picked-up by the model.

During RLHF, the human evaluators are aware of such biases and are instructed to down-vote the model responses that incorporate such biases.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#92

Post by II2II »

dontseethefnord wrote: post #49
II2II wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I have never heard of someone referring to 7 as a lucky number, 7 is the most common sum of two rolled dice. So I can see how people would regard it as a lucky number. Along the same lines, I assume that someone who mentions 42 as a random number has at least some interest in science fiction.

You must be living under a rock if you’ve never heard of 7 as a lucky number.

I prefer to calculate with numbers, and don't pay much attention to superstitions around them. I don't gamble, nor much pay attention to conversations about gambling, so I pretty much ignore any mention of lucky numbers when such topics arise (aside from knowing that some people have lucky numbers). If you refer being isolated from a particular aspect of life living under a rock, so be it. Though I will point out that I like wide open space. I'm more of an astronomer than a geologist!

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#93

Post by Terr_ »

dkenyser wrote: post #51
mplewis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't emulate human behavior. They spit out chunks of words in an order that parrots some of their training data.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like we're splitting hairs here. > spits out chunks of words in an order that parrots some of their training data. So, if the data was created by humans then how is that different from "emulating human behavior?" Genuinely curious as this is my rough interpretation as well.

I think a common issue in LLM discussions is a confusion between author and character. Much of this confusion is deliberately encouraged by those companies in how they designed their systems.

The real-world LLM takes documents and make them longer, while we humans are busy anthropomorphizing the fictional characters that appear in those documents. Our normal tendency to fake-believe in characters from books is turbocharged when it's an interactive story, and we start to think that the choose-your-own adventure character exists somewhere on the other side of the screen.

> how is that different from "emulating human behavior?"

Suppose I created a program that generated stories with a Klingon character, and all the real-humans agree it gives impressive output, with cohesive dialogue, understandable motivations, references to in-universe lore, etc.

It wouldn't be entirely wrong to say that the program has "emulated a Klingon", but it isn't quite right either: Can you emulate something that doesn't exist in the real world?

It may be better to say that my program has emulated a particular kind of output which we would normally get from a Star Trek writer.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#94

Post by eterm »

robertlagrant wrote: post #57
sedatk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Adams picked 42 randomly though. :)

Not at all. It was derived mathematically from the Question: What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

It was just a joke, and doubly so the fact it "works" in base 13.

It was written as a joke in fairly ramshackle radio play. He had no idea at the time of writing it that the joke would connect so well and become it's own "thing" and dominate discourse of the radio series and novels to come.

It's not a joke about numbers, it's a linguistical joke, that works well on radio, something that HHGTG is stuffed full of.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12229/how-did-doug...

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#95

Post by rainsford »

itchyjunk wrote: post #86
rainsford wrote: post #74

> ...a lot of the safeguards and policy we have to manage humans own unreliability may serve us well in managing the unreliability of AI systems too. It seems like an incredibly bad outcome if we accept "AI" that's fundamentally flawed in a way similar to if not worse than humans and try to work around it rather than relegating it to unimportant tasks while we work towards a standard of intelligence we'd otherwise ex…

What is your measure of intelligence?

I honestly don't have a great one, which is less worrying than it might otherwise be since I'm not sure anyone else does either. But in a human context, I think intelligence requires some degree of creativity, self-motivation, and improvement through feedback. Put a bunch of humans on an island with various objects and the means for survival and they're going to do...something. Over enough time they're likely to do a lot of unpredictable somethings and turn coconuts into rocket ships or whatever. Put a bunch of LLMs on an equivalent island with equivalent ability to work with their environment and they're going to do precisely nothing at all.

On the computer side of things, I think at a minimum I'd want intelligence capable of taking advantage of the fact that it's a deterministic machine capable of unerringly performing various operations with perfect accuracy absent a stray cosmic ray or programming bug. Star Trek's Data struggled with human emotions and things like that, but at least he typically got the warp core calculations correct. Accepting LLMs with the accuracy of a particularly lazy intern feels like it misses the point of computers entirely.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#96

Post by sigpwned »

rainsford wrote: post #74

> ...a lot of the safeguards and policy we have to manage humans own unreliability may serve us well in managing the unreliability of AI systems too. It seems like an incredibly bad outcome if we accept "AI" that's fundamentally flawed in a way similar to if not worse than humans and try to work around it rather than relegating it to unimportant tasks while we work towards a standard of intelligence we'd otherwise ex…

I don’t disagree. But I also wonder if there even is an objective “right” answer in a lot of cases. If the goal is for computers to replace humans in a task, then the computer can only get the right answer for that task if humans agree what the right answer is. Outside of STEM, where AI is already having a meaningful impact (at least in my opinion), I’m not sure humans actually agree that there is a right answer in many cases, let alone what the right answer is. From that perspective, correctness is in the eye of the beholder (or the metric), and “correct” AI is somewhere between poorly defined and a contradiction.

Also, I think it’s apparent that the world won’t wait for correct AI, whatever that even is, whether or not it even can exist, before it adopts AI. It sure looks like some employers are hurtling towards replacing (or, at least, reducing) human headcount with AI that performs below average at best, and expecting whoever’s left standing to clean up the mess. This will free up a lot of talent, both the people who are cut and the people who aren’t willing to clean up the resulting mess, for other shops that take a more human-based approach to staffing.

I’m looking forward to seeing which side wins. I don’t expect it to be cut-and-dry. But I do expect it to be interesting.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#97

Post by tavavex »

LoganDark wrote: post #81
MrMcCall wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the posters that make fun of those corporate motivational posters. My favorite is: No one is as dumb as all of us. And they trained their PI* on that giant turd pile. * Pseudo Intelligence

I don't count LLMs as intelligent. To a certain degree they can be a component of intelligence, but I don't count an LLM on its own.

Artificial intelligence is a generic term for a very broad field that has existed for like 50-70 years, depending on who you ask. 'Intelligence' isn't praise or endorsement. I think it's a succinct word that does the job at explaining what the goal here is.

All the "Artificial intelligence? Hah, more like Bad Unintelligence, am I right???" takes just sound so corny to me.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#98

Post by tavavex »

Xelynega wrote: post #79
educasean wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this just pedantry or is there some insight to be gleaned by the distinction you made?

It's not really pedantic when there's an entire wikipedia page on the tendency for people to conflate the two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect I believe the distinction they're trying to make is between "sounding like a human"(being able to create output that we understand as language) and "thinking like a human"(having the capacity for experience, empathy, semantic comprehension, etc.)

But nowhere in the original post was there a mention of "thinking like a human". The poster said that these systems, at their core, emulate human behaviors. Writing is a human behavior - as are all the things that are requirements for writing (operating within the rules of given language/s, making logical choices, etc). The things you listed as evidence of human thinking were never implied when talking about replicating what human writing is.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#99

Post by [deleted] »

eterm wrote: post #94
robertlagrant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. It was derived mathematically from the Question: What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

It was just a joke, and doubly so the fact it "works" in base 13. It was written as a joke in fairly ramshackle radio play. He had no idea at the time of writing it that the joke would connect so well and become it's own "thing" and dominate discourse of the radio series and novels to come. It's not a joke about numbers, it's a linguistical joke, that works well on radio, something that HHGTG is stuffed full of. http…

[deleted]

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#100

Post by tavavex »

mdp2021 wrote: post #42
th0ma5 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racist is the wrong word probably maybe ... antisocial in that it is against society.

I wrote '"racist"', because the proponents insist that "all members of class X are also Y" (there where X does not imply Y as an "analytic judgement" - it is not entailed from the nature of X but accidental to X ... yet seen by the proponents as a constant property of X): that is the character of racism. "All wood is odorous", etc. Those who insist that "all humans are " are "racist" against humanity (against the "hu…

Isn't "prejudice" a better word? It's the base underlying idea of assuming some bad quality about an individual based on their membership in a group that they can't change. It's just strange for me when one 'ism' out of thousands is taken as the defining form of prejudice. Maybe it's just me, but I find it prevalent in US-centric communities, where racism is the agreed-upon baseline discrimination, from which parallels are drawn to the other forms.
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